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Friday, June 29, 2012

The model for ObamaCare is the famed European health care system: "The NHS kills off 130,000 elderly patients every year"

From the UK MailOnline.
NHS doctors are prematurely ending the lives of thousands of elderly hospital patients because they are difficult to manage or to free up beds, a senior consultant claimed yesterday.
Professor Patrick Pullicino said doctors had turned the use of a controversial ‘death pathway’ into the equivalent of euthanasia of the elderly.
I'm getting older and I don't feel so good, but don't take me to the death chamber hospital.

A Department of Health spokesman said: ‘The Liverpool Care Pathway is not euthanasia and we do not recognise these figures. The pathway is recommended by NICE and has overwhelming support from clinicians – at home and abroad – including the Royal College of Physicians.

I mean, how can you possibly think that a group called NICE wants anything but the best?  I'm sure the when the Department of HHS starts naming its cost control groups they won't be called "Death Panels."  I think something like Best Practices Panels sounds lovely.



Fast & Furious e-mails confirm that guns were only supposed to be tracked by being found at crime scenes.

From Ace of Spades:
The tactic, which was intended to allow agents to track criminal networks by finding the guns at crime scenes [???], was condemned after two guns that were part of the operation were found at U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry’s murder scene.

I have said repeatedly that the only thing that made sense about this program was that guns found at crime scenes in Mexico could be identified as coming from the US.  How does finding an American gun at a crime scene in Mexico track criminal networks?


Stand by for more.

UPDATE: DOJ moves to protect Holder 

The contempt vote technically opened the door for the House to call on the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia to bring the case before a grand jury. But because U.S. Attorney Ronald Machen works for Holder and because President Obama has already asserted executive privilege over the documents in question, some expected Holder's Justice Department to balk.
Deputy Attorney General James Cole confirmed in a letter to House Speaker John Boehner that the department in fact would not pursue prosecution. The attorney general's withholding of documents pertaining to Operation Fast and Furious, he wrote, "does not constitute a crime." 
Holder has told the attorneys that work for him not to prosecute him, so they don't.  The American legal system at work.


The Higher Education Bubble

When Icons Crumble

To many Conservatives, me among them, Chief Justice John Roberts was an icon:  somebody widely and uncritically admired, someone principled in upholding the law and the Constitution.  So it’s sad to see him deciding between constitutional principle and institutional principle.  Because, make no mistake about it, Roberts’ decision on ObamaCare was designed to burnish the standing of the Supreme Court.
The Left has been very busy warning Roberts that striking down ObamaCare would put into question the Supreme Court’s role as an a-political institution.  Roberts brief in his decision on this case showed that he took that to heart.  So he joined the Liberals on the Court  - ironically, whose vote was never in doubt because of their politics - and issued an opinion designed to show two contradictory things.  First, to show that he could rise above ideology by saying ObamaCare passes constitutional muster, while simultaneously rejecting the primary argument for its constitutionality, the Commerce clause. 
What he demonstrated instead was that he was a man who cared more for his reputation than for the Constitution.  I’m sure he believed that he was giving the Right the words they wanted to hear by rejecting a boundless Commerce clause.  But the people who are concerned about an all-powerful State care very little whether the club being used to beat them into submission is the Commerce clause of the power to tax.   
Conservatives, like George Will, who believe that Roberts’ decision represents a victory, are mistaken.  And Roberts, who hoped to sustain the stature of the Supreme Court has done the opposite removing the last vestige of faith held by Conservatives that a slim majority of the court stood between the people and unlimited government.  The Roberts Court is now a results oriented court and you can’t get any more political than that. 
Rush Limbaugh said it well yesterday when he said that it’s now up to us.  The court is no longer there to protect the people from the government. 

Thursday, June 28, 2012

Wednesday, June 27, 2012

WHY DON'T YOU MIND MY OWN BUSINESS?

How Cuba Became a 'Happy' Country

Via the Wall Street Journal:
In what league does Iraq beat Britain, Haiti beat the United States, and Afghanistan beat Denmark? Political corruption? Violent crime? Temperature? No, welcome to the weird and wonderful world of the Happy Planet Index. It is a little window into the way many environmentalists think.
As they say, read the whole thing.

Here is a link to the latest "Happy Planet" report. According to the Happy Planet Index, the best of all possible countries would have the well-being of the people of Denmark, the life expectancy of the Japanese and the ecological footprint of Afghanistan. Putting all these factors together, the ideal places to live are Costa Rica and Viet Nam with Colombia, Belize and El Salvador close behind. 

If you want a "Happy Planet" you definitely don’t want to live in the United States.

Let it be noted that the Happy Planet people are British, living in England rather than the countries, like Afghanistan, that they are happy to promote. A comment from one of the readers of the Wall Street Journal article summarizes these people perfectly.

Not long ago, I lived for a year with a family of subsistence farmers in southern Africa. I learned first-hand, every day, how arduous and circumscribed their lives are. But we sure were ecologically sensitive -- you can't use much water when you have to walk half a mile to get it.

Soon after I returned, I was hired by the WSJ to interview, among others, one of America's most prominent environmentalist/businessmen. He talked at length about his excitement over Cuba. With no money coming from the former Soviet Union, there was no gas or oil. So farmers were forced to plow with oxen. Wasn't that a wonderful, sustainable way of life? I thought of my African family and thought, "Not so much."

In fact, he went on, he was so interested in the lessons we could learn, he was going to visit Cuba soon to see the wonderfulness for himself. But first, he was flying first class to Italy to go fishing in the mountains with some friends for a week.

All I could think was that sometimes, irony is too cheap to even comment upon.

"... believing in Barack Obama is just plain magical thinking. "

Andrew Klavan

As everything President Obama touches turns to crap, we begin to hear more and more leftist attacks on Mitt Romney the man. Andrea Mitchell on leftist network NBC dishonestly edits a tape to make Romney seem “out of touch.” Joe Williams from the leftist website Politico crazily suggests Romney is only comfortable around white people. Lawrence O’Donnell on the leftist cable net MSNBC moronically attacks Mrs. Romney for riding horses. And just about every leftist everywhere from the New York Times all the way up to some ostensibly legitimate news sources decries the fact that the Republican candidate for president is, horror upon horrors, a Mormon.

Really? I mean, while believing in the Angel Moroni may be kind of odd, believing in Barack Obama is just plain magical thinking. The jobs “created or saved,” the new tone in Washington, the health care “reform,” the new approach to the Middle East, the Russian reset — sure, all religions have their hard-to-swallow miracle tales but most of them don’t do this kind of real-world damage.

Read the whole thing.

Sullivan reinstated at UVA; faculty and press now own the university and can be blamed when things go wrong.

A week ago I wrote a little post about the issue of governance at the University of Virginia Higher Education Bubble Update: The Virginian Pilot Has Called for the Ouster of Helen Dragas … Which Means She Is Perfect for the Job.

In the intervening week, the political pressure got too much for the Board of Visitors, the name for the university’s board of directors, who gave in and reinstated President Sullivan. The board acted shamefully in backing down and abdicating its responsibility. It is now a wholly owned subsidiary of the University of Virginia’s faculty.

A Boards of Directors role in corporate life is to represent the shareholders, the real owners of the corporation. The UVA Board of Visitors is supposed to represent the citizens of Virginia, the real owners of UVA. Instead, like many corporate boards, the UVA Board of Visitors has been captured by the very people they ought to be overseeing. When that happens, things can go wrong very fast.

The problems facing the University of Virginia are similar to the problems facing virtually all higher educational institutions: the HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE. The prices they charge for their product have spiraled out of control and people are paying ridiculous prices for a certificate that has diminished value. Students are taking on debt to get the certificate, one-third don’t even get their degree, total student loan debt now exceeds credit card debt and it’s the one debt that can’t be discharged by bankruptcy.

Apparently the housing bubble didn’t teach us a thing. The one difference between the housing bubble and the higher education bubble is that if you are upside down in your mortgage, you at least have a home to live in. 

Like the realtors and the mortgage lenders ten years ago, the inhabitants of academia are in denial. They may sense that there is something wrong, but they don’t know how to fix it and are in denial about the urgency of the problem. Stuck in a thousand year old time warp, they have as much grasp of why they are in decline as newspaper editors were when they were introduced to the Internet. As recently as this week, Leonard Pitts was trying to rally the troops behind the viability and absolute necessity of newspapers. Denial is not a just river in Egypt. The simple fact that you had to watch Fox News or go to the Internet to have heard of the Fast and Furious scandal illustrates why Pitts is wrong.

But back to UVA. The faculty staged a coup and won. It how owns the problem and is responsible for the solution. I have zero faith in their ability, indeed in their desire, to address the problem. And when UVA becomes a historical curiosity, reminiscent of Colonial Williamsburg just down the road, we will know who to blame.

CNN Sinks To 21-Year Primetime Ratings Low In Second Quarter

For this year’s second quarter, CNN hit a low among total viewers and the key adults 25-54 demographic, with all primetime programs posting steep declines. The network averaged 446,000 total viewers and 129,000 in the 25-54 demo in primetime. Compared to last year’s second quarter, that’s down 35% and 41%, respectively. Rival Fox New Channel, meanwhile, with 1.79 million primetime total viewers on average, was down 1% from its 2011 second-quarter numbers. FNC lost 14% in the 25-54, bringing in 355,000 viewers. MSNBC was down 13% in total primetime viewers, with 689,000 on average, and down 17% in the 25-54 with 217,000. The quarter ran March 26-June 22.

So let's review:
  • CNN has 446,000 viewers
  • Fox News has 1,790,000 viewers
  • CNN lost 35% of its viewers
  • Fox lost 1% of its viewers
The country is center-right the geniuses who invented 24/7 news programming decided to go after the smallest demographic, and even they are tuning out.

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Antarctic ice shelves not melting at all, new field data show

The Virginian Pilot recently ran a story by Seth Borenstein of the Associated Press stating that global warming was causing the oceans to rise because of melting ice.  They went  even further telling us that the rise of the ocean was greater in this area.  When I read that, I went "HUH?"   The ocean rising in spots?  How is that possible?  Look at the globe; all the oceans are connected.  Did you even get the water in one end of a bathtub to go higher than the other end?  How does a story like that pass the smell test?  Are people with English Lit degrees totally, incredibly, immutably stupid? 

Of course the give away was the part about global warming which is now more religion than science.  Faith can turn water into wine, and cause the oceans to rise more in spots.  It can even cause oceans to rise despite the fact that the poles are not melting.  The "melting of the poles"  myth was always based on computer models rather than actual observation.  When real scientists went to look, by golly, the poles were not melting after all. 
Twenty-year-old models which have suggested serious ice loss in the eastern Antarctic have been compared with reality for the first time - and found to be wrong, so much so that it now appears that no ice is being lost at all.

Read the whole thing.  They even got elephant seals involved. 

They say we should only speak good of the dead. Maurice Sendak is dead. Good.

Who could have guessed that the man who wrote about monsters in Where the Wild Things Are was a moral monster. Turns out that he fantasized about using a suicide vest to kill George Bush, Dick Cheney and their wives. Via Jim Treacher.

Representative Lisa Brown’s Vagina


I grew up in Michigan.  Most of the good people of that state are sober, hard working, salt-of-the-earth types.  But Michigan also produces some whackos.  Thankfully, most of them are concentrated in and around Detroit – which explains Detroit.  
In a recent speech Representative Lisa Brown (D - Bloomfield Hills) went on at passionate length about her Jewishness, her dishware and Jewish law.  She then claimed that a law regulating abortion clinics was aimed at her vagina.  But I’ll let Ann Coulter explain.
A Michigan legislator, Lisa Brown, gave a speech in the statehouse last week that would have made her right at home in a women's studies course at a local community college, but a wacko in a group of actual legislators.

She commented on a pending abortion bill by first announcing that she was Jewish, kept kosher, described her various sets of plates, and then saying that Jewish law makes abortion mandatory to save the life of the mother.

     ...

 Then she said: "I have not asked you to adopt and adhere to my religious beliefs. Why are you asking me to adopt yours?"

Her smashing crescendo was: "And finally Mr. Speaker, I'm flattered that you're all so interested in my vagina, but 'no' means 'no'!"

It's not clear where Rep. Brown got the idea that the Republican caucus was planning on date-raping her, but I think there's been a terrible misunderstanding. The bill under consideration merely ensured the safety of women having abortions -- and, in a small way, the safety of the fetus, whom the U.S. Supreme Court has prohibited legislatures from protecting directly....




I have not polled all the Republicans in the Michigan statehouse yet, but the ones I've spoken to assure me that Rep. Brown's vagina played a very small role in their deliberations. It's odd that she seems to think she's the object of so much Republican male fantasy.

Why must a certain type of woman always start shouting about her vagina whenever the topic of abortion comes up?

Do what you want with your vagina. Pro-lifers just want to stop babies from being killed. It would be as though a slaveholder complained that Republicans wanted to regulate his anus by abolishing slavery and taking away his right to crap on his slaves.



For the deranged Left, everything is about them, and if it's a deranged leftist female it's always about her vagina. Dear Ms. Brown, please get over yourself ... and your female parts - all of them.

Monday, June 25, 2012

Media Cannibals

The media have traditionally circled the wagons when one of them is attacked.  That seems to be changing.  Perhaps it's the pressure of the "new media."  But even now they are not going all-in but taking little nibbles of each other. For a real takedown and the back story, go here.


Via Newsbusters.

Saturday, June 23, 2012

Why Beauty Matters

H/T Vanderleun

Why Are the Republicans Being So Political? It's Just Dead Mexicans.

At Nuking Politics we see a view of Eric Holder we generally don't see.


I mean he generally looks like he wonders why some members of Congress care about a few hundred dead Mexican ... or as Keln puts it
You know, nothing chaps my hide more than chaps and one party or another in Congress grandstanding and making a big deal out of a little thing in an election year. Why are the Republicans making a mountain out of this Fast and Furious thing? I mean, sure, like a few hundred people got killed, but only one of them was an American. The rest were Mexicans, and if Obama and Attorney General Holder don't care about them, then why should the Republicans, amiright?
Look, we all know that Fast and Furious was designed to make it look as if most of the guns used by the incredibly violent drug cartels in Mexico came from the US. So we had to have a bunch of dead Mexicans killed by guns purchased in America so that we Holder and Obama could get new gun control legislation passed. So from that perspective the dead Mexicans died in a good cause.  amiright?

Call for Chinese Delivery, Shoot Deliveryman, Eat Food, Come Back to Rifle Through Murdered Man’s Car.

If Obama had six sons they would look like these.

Bill Whittle explains Fast and Furious and why Obama invoked executive privilege



For Obama and the MSM, three hundred dead Mexicans and one murdered American border patrol agent is a small price to pay for disarming Americans.




Fast and Furious was not a botched law enforcement program.  It was specifically designed to create Mexican casualties in order to validate a statistical lie that Obama had told, namely that most of the guns used in Mexican crimes came from the US.  When that was shown not to be the case, Obama and Holder conspired to ship thousands of guns to the Mexican drug cartels to increase death toll of Mexicans killed by American guns.  Nothing could have been more cold blooded and cynical maniacal.   

That is the "secret" that the claim of executive priviledge is designed to hide. 

Bill Whittle asks if  the MSM have no shame and the answer is "no."

Green ‘drivel’ The godfather of global warming lowers the boom on climate change hysteria.

From the Toronto Sun: 
Two months ago, James Lovelock, the godfather of global warming, gave a startling interview to msnbc.com in which he acknowledged he had been unduly “alarmist” about climate change.


To summarize: 
  • “the problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago.”
  • unlike many climate scientists who fear a loss of government funding if they admit error, as a freelance scientist, he’s never been afraid to revise his theories in the face of new evidence. Indeed, that’s how science advances.
  •  Lovelock has now come out in favour of natural gas fracking (which environmentalists also oppose), as a low-polluting alternative to coal.
  • Lovelock blasted greens for treating global warming like a religion.  {using guilt as a drving force]
  • Lovelock mocks the idea modern economies can be powered by wind turbines.As he puts it, “so-called ‘sustainable development’ … is meaningless drivel …
  • “One thing that being a scientist has taught me is that you can never be certain about anything.

Read the whole thing.

It looks like the godfather of global warming is saying "Rush was right."

Friday, June 22, 2012

They told me if I voted for John McCain we’d see an economic catastrophe for African-Americans. And they were right!

Via Instapundit:
 Numerous businesses have reported payroll increases, and important professional industries like law and accounting are beginning to recover. Blacks, however, have been largely left out of this recovery—including college-educated blacks, who in many cases have been forced to settle for jobs well below their qualifications.”

No Peggy, Americans are not looking for a leader to give them meaning, a higher purpose!

Peggy Noonan in her column today in the Wall Street Journal is telling Romney that he needs to articulate a vision. She tells us that in electing a President
People want meaning, a higher and declared purpose.
How about not screwing up? How about letting people live their own lives. How about letting people decide what the higher declared purpose is in their own lives? Peggy remains in love with the idea of leaders who will give meaning to a country. Despite having worked for Ronald Reagan, she still doesn't realize that his major domestic accomplishments were removing regulations and burdensome taxes. One of his first acts as president was to remove price controls on domestic oil, eliminating the long lines at gas stations and reducing prices almost like magic.

Why is it that so many so-called smart people think that the American people need a “leader?” Mobs have leaders. Mass movements have leaders. Revolutions have leaders. George Washington was the leader of an army and later led a new-made government. Once the new country was established, laws were enacted and customs created, the American people wanted to be left alone and looked to the government to do only those things they could not do for themselves such as law enforcement and national defense.

The people of this country don’t want a “leader” who will give them a vision and compel them to his will. That’s the Obama Way, the Left’s way. Remember how Michelle Obama told us during a speech at UCLA on Febrary 18, 2008:

"Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed."

The people in this country want to be allowed to create their own vision, not to be enlisted in a mass movement. The people of this country can pretty well run their own lives; can pretty well manage their own affairs and the affairs of their community. The people of this country can go to work where they want or start their own businesses if they want. The main obstacles to the vision of a free people living their lives freely are those who want power over us, to ride us like a horse. And it is people like Peggy Noonan who desire to find that horseman to run the country and the people in it. It was the appeal of Barack Obama to the chattering classes because in that kind of country, the chatterers can help hold the whip in case the horse slows down or wants to, in Michelle’s words “to go back to your lives as usual.”

Quiet down Peggy. I don’t need a leader to give me a vision. In fact, I don’t want a leader to try to force his vision on the American people. A good technocrat who will clear the undergrowth, drain the swamp, cut leviathan down to size will do just fine.

Politico Reporter: Romney Only Comfortable Around ‘White Folks’

Martin Bashir's assembly of bigots.

Unlike the 2,000-Death Count in Iraq, ABC, NBC, PBS, MSNBC Skip 2,000 Marker in Afghanistan

Via Newsbusters: 


On June 13, the CBS Evening News devoted a story by David Martin to the Afghanistan death count reaching 2,000, as Martin interviewed a mother of a fallen Marine. CBS was alone. There was no story last week on the Afghanistan death “milestone” on ABC, NBC, the PBS NewsHour – or even on the MSNBC programs found in Nexis, including Rachel “Our Military’s In a Perilous Drift” Maddow.

But the networks were all more aggressive when the 2,000 mark arrived in Iraq on October 25, 2005. The Big Three networks devoted 14 morning and evening news stories to the death toll from October 24 through the end of October, and another 24 anchor briefs or mentions. They used the number to spell “disaster for this White House.”

Bob Schieffer:

CBS anchor Bob Schieffer delivered only this single sentence [to the elections in Iraq] -- "Iraq's government announced today that voters did approve the country's new constitution in this month's referendum" -- before moving on to a full story about the 2,000th death of U.S. servicemen in Iraq, a piece he could not resist introducing without adding this snide aside: "More than 90 percent of the 2,000 who died in the war have died since the President declared major combat was at an end in May 2003."
Ted Koppel: 

 This was the week, of course, that the death toll of American servicemen and women in Iraq topped 2,000. Statistical markers like that are never a fair way of judging the legitimacy of a war but they seem to have an impact, nevertheless.

Katie Couric:
All right, as if the White House didn't have enough trouble right now, Iraq is still looming. The two--it's going to be 2,000th--we're going to get up to the 2000th death of US servicemen and women in Iraq very soon. I think we're four away from that. Meanwhile, Brent Scowcroft gave some scathing criticism of the Bush administration in this week's New Yorker.

Davide Gregory::
“Criminal charges, a failed nomination to the Supreme Court and a grim milestone in Iraq, 2000 US soldiers killed in action. Perhaps the worst political week of the Bush presidency.”

Mark Shields on PBS:

“We just passed 2,000 killed in Iraq this week, 90 percent killed of them have been killed since the president announced mission accomplished.”




Perhaps because Obama pronounced Afghanistan as the “good war.”  Perhaps because the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize is in the Oval Office.  Perhaps because … ah, hell, we all know why.  It’s the reason why there has been no coverage of the Fast and Furious gun running scandal in the media until Obama invoked executive privilege to sustain the cover-up a little longer.  No one reads the newspapers or watches the MSM news shows for news any more.  Today, they are the punch line for a joke.


Thursday, June 21, 2012

Gallup Daily: Obama Job Approval - shocked it is so high!

Gallup Daily: Obama Job Approval

Each result is based on a three-day rolling average

Why as tracking the guns run to Mexico important to the Obama Adminstration?

Weapons sold to cartel straw purchasers by Arizona gun dealers were logged by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). The ATF worked with the FBI, DEA, Homeland Security, and IRS CID in a strike force that was well aware of how the cartel’s gunmen used their weapons. After committing a violent crime, Sinaloa gunmen dumped their weapons at the scene to avoid capture with murder weapons. The guns collected at the scene had their serial numbers recorded by Mexican law enforcement officials, who sent those recorded to the ATF for tracing. Each weapon recovered was “proof” that the Obama administration used to support the infamous “90-percent lie” they spread in hopes of building up public support for gun control.
THIS is why tracking the guns to the gunrunners was not a big deal. Tracking the guns to the US WAS a big deal.
MSNBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post and other left-leaning news organizations have tried to minimize the scandal as much as possible, claiming it was “botched” instead of an operation designed to require Mexican fatalities.

Politico Reporter: Romney Only Comfortable Around ‘White Folks’


I don't think the Left know how to handle the fact that they are the ones who are making the racist comments.

Brian Williams (MSNBC News) Uncurious About AG Holder Running Guns to Mexican Drug Cartels, Thinks that Republicans Bringing It Up are Practicing “Broken Politics.”

Well, this is MSNBC, after all.

None of the networks (except FOX) mentioned this story at all before this. If people only watched the alphabet networks, they must be wondering what happened. An attorney general being held in contempt of congress and a president invoking executive privilege and nobody said anything about this? It must be hitting them with the unexpectedness of a space alien invasion.


University of Minnesota tells students that it's unfair to be white.


The University of Minnesota - Duluth (UMD) is now sponsoring an ad-campaign designed to achieve "racial justice" by raising awareness of "white privilege."
The project disseminates its message, that "society was setup for us [whites]" and as such is "unfair," through an aggressive campaign of online videos, billboards, and lectures. The ads feature a number of Caucasians confessing their guilt for the supposed "privilege" that comes along with their fair features.




"You give me better jobs, better pay, better treatment, and a better chance - all because of the color of my skin," reads one poster that features a close shot of a Caucasian male.The Un-Fair campaign also held a series of lectures and events on campus last semester. One included a presentation by Tim Wise, author of Dear White America. In his book, Wise confesses a "longstanding fantasy" where he turns to a man with a "God Bless the USA" button and asks him, "why can't you just get over it?"
These lectures were publicly endorsed by university Chancellor Lendley Black.

The racism, sexism, class-ism has now become the exclusive property of Liberalism, academia and the press.  If someone was deliberately trying to set race against race, it's difficult to think of a program that is more designed to do just that.  It's part of an explanation of black mob attacks on whites.

On a related note:  Gender-neutral bathrooms have become a priority at the University of Minnesota under Chancellor Lendley Black.  Because sexual orientation privileges people who have a sexual orientation.

Fast & Furious update

Pundit and Pundette has a roundup.

I'm thinking Fast & Furious, the sequel.

Attorney General Holder Explains Fast & Furious to Congressman Issa.


ISSA:                      So, Mr. Holder, Fast & Furious was designed to do exactly what?

HOLDER:              Fast & Furious was designed to identify major gun traffickers supplying weapons to Mexican drug cartels.

ISSA:                      And how was this done?

HOLDER:              The government was going to allow straw purchasers to buy guns in the US and track them into Mexico.

ISSA:                      So the government set up a gun store near the Mexican border designed to lure straw buyers?

HOLDER:              No.  We pressured existing gun stores to sell weapons to straw purchasers.

ISSA:                      So you embedded devices into these guns to allow them to be traced?

HOLDER:              No.  But we knew the serial numbers of the guns.

ISSA:                      And then you followed to straw purchasers to the Mexican border?

HOLDER:              We tried, but lost track of them.  They were really sneaky that way.

ISSA:                      So then you called the Mexican police?

HOLDER:              No. But we knew the serial numbers on the guns.

ISSA:                      How would that help you identify the major gun runners?

HOLDER:              I didn’t say the plan was perfect.

ISSA:                      So how were the guns recovered?

HOLDER:              We picked them up at the scene of shootings if the killers left them behind.

ISSA:                      And after allowing thousands of guns cross the border and hundreds of people get killed by them, including a Border Patrol agent, did that help you identify the major gun traffickers to Mexican drug cartels.

HOLDER:              No.  But it did prove that if we allowed thousands of guns to be shipped to Mexican drug cartels, the serial numbers on the guns would prove that they were bought in the US.

ISSA:                      But how did that help you achieve your original objective of identifying major gun traffickers?

HOLDER:              Well, to tell the truth Mr. Issa, it didn’t.  But we have the guns and the serial numbers and the crime reports so we can move on to stricter gun control in the US so that the only way the Mexican drug cartels can get more American guns is if we ship them.   I’m thinking Fast & Furious, the sequel. 

$9 Billion in ‘Stimulus’ for Solar, Wind Projects Made 910 Final Jobs -- $9.8 Million Per Job

Through the grant program, $9 billion was spent to, in the end, establish 910 jobs that will last upwards of 30 years. That means those jobs cost, in the end, about $9.8 million to create.

Wednesday, June 20, 2012

NBC Prepares to Replace Ann Curry on ‘Today’


Which creates the questions  "Who is Ann Curry and what is Today."

Higher Education Bubble Update: The Virginian Pilot Has Called for the Ouster of Helen Dragas … Which Means She Is Perfect for the Job.



The University of Virginia Board of Visitors ousted UVA’s president, Teresa Sullivan, recently which has caused an uproar in the establishment press and at UVA.  Like the passengers on the RMS Titanic just before its little accident, they were happy with her leadership.  Sullivan was busy re-arranging the deck chairs and that just wasn’t good enough for rector Dragas and the rest of the board, who were looking for a change in direction.
The issue facing higher education is that it is on the cusp of a bubble.  Decades of double digit price increases has impoverished the families who paid and the students who loaded up on student loans.  And for what?  The graduates of these prestigious universities are elbowing each other for jobs that require them to ask “would you like fries with that?”  And those are the lucky ones.  Others are moving back in with their parents offering to work as unpaid interns in hopes of getting the next job opening in the Obama economy. 
At one time a university education was a ticket to a professional career.  It was also affordable and was largely responsible for creating an expanding middle class.  But higher education, like the housing bubble, has become the next financial bubble.  Professors and administrators have replaced realtors and bankers as the villains of the Big Education drama. 
Inside the Ivory Tower nothing seems wrong.  New classes of fresh students enter to be fleeced with promises of outsized paychecks as “studies” classes and non-teaching administrators grow like kudzu.  Outside it’s becoming obvious that something’s seriously wrong as student loan debt – which cannot be discharged through bankruptcy – has grown to over a trillion dollars and graduates can’t find jobs.  Even worse, nearly 30% of students who take out loans don’t get degrees.  Law school graduates are being supported by their schools for a year after graduation because they can’t find jobs.  Big Education has become less and less about the students and more and more about the institution.
One of the reasons that Big Media doesn’t recognize the problem is because they don’t recognize their own problem.  They are lost in a technological time warp.  Newspapers are losing readers and TV is losing eyes because information and entertainment delivery doesn’t mean newsprint and TV shows any more.  Technology has made them obsolete; they’re dying and they are either in denial or don’t know what to do about it.  The old education model is literally hundreds of years old.  The idea that to get an education today requires moving to a campus for four or more years at a cost of a couple of hundred thousand dollars is ending.  Texas has set the goal of providing a bachelor’s degree for $10,000.  This will not require residence on a campus. And why should it in an age of instant total communication wherever you are?   Wisconsin has developed a self-paced, on-line degree program that measures competency instead of "seat time."   What a concept!  A couple of Stanford professors taught free web-based courses last year that reached over 100,000 students.

I suspect that one of the reasons Sullivan was fired is that she did not recognize the problem or believed it was not urgent.  And why should she?  Her salary and benefits exceed half-million dollars a year, even after losing her job as President.  Five UVA employees earn over $500,000, another eight earn over $400,000, another 24 earn over $300,000.  Of the above only 15 of the 38 actually teach, the rest “administer.”    
Dragas owns a construction company so she has experience with financial bubbles.  She recognizes that the University system as currently constituted is about to implode because it is financially unsustainable.  The faculty is happy with the system.  The press is happy with the system.  The only people getting the shaft are the students and their parents.  Big Education and Big Media are both dinosaurs desperate to keep the status quo.  Meet the dustbin of history fellows, you’ll have a lot of company.


UPDATE:  Thanks to a link by Glenn Reynolds, it has been asserted that the real problem with Teresa Sullivan is the issue of scientific fraud in a paper she co-authored with Elizabeth Warren who claimed minority status as 1/32nd Indian.   I have read that at Legal Insurrection.  Whether that is THE reason for her dismissal is a fair question.  If that is the real story, I have a feeling that it will not be told for quite some time.  Nevertheless, my critique of academia stands and I believe that Dragas, along with everyone else in the construction industry, is acutely sensitive to bubbles of the kind academia is currently experiencing.  When you can take a course at Stanford via the Internet for free, you know that the brick and mortar model of higher education is in deep trouble. 

UPDATE 2:  From Inside Higher Ed


E-mail messages were flying among leaders of the Board of Visitors of the University of Virginia in the weeks leading up to the ouster of Teresa A. Sullivan as president of the university. The e-mail messages show that one reason board leaders wanted to move quickly was the belief that UVa needed to get involved in a serious way with online education.

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Mark Levin defends Daily Caller Reporter.


Reporters are only supposed to speak when he gives them the right to speak.




All the other reporters are mouthpieces for the state.

Glenn Beck mocks Mrs. Greenspan


"How about we direct a little of our anger at rich hypocrites like Mrs. Greenspan?

LOL!

"Are you lost, Daddy?"



Mark Steyn gives us the background of the answer that we get from the Left "Shut up." 
It's an oft-retailed quote. But fewer people know the line that precedes it (in Lardner's novel The Young Immigrunts): a kid asking, "Are you lost, Daddy?"

It's hard to admit you took a wrong turn, harder yet when you are an elected oficial and the crap that you have been spreading to the gullible public makes things go horribly wrong.
As any motoring pater knows, it's not easy to give an honest answer to that question. And the hardest thing of all is to turn around and go back, retracing your steps to the point where you made the wrong turn. If you're a politician, it's even harder. Leviathan has no reverse gear: "Forward!" as the Obama campaign's 2012 slogan puts it. Yet in the end, if any of the Western world is to survive, it has to find a way to turn around, to go back.

Take the euro. It should not exist. It should never have been invented. And, ultimately, it is necessary to find a way to disinvent it. Yet even one of the least deluded of Continental leaders cannot acknowledge the need to turn around: To Angela Merkel, the euro is not a mere currency but what she calls a "Schicksalsgemeinschaft" — or "community of destiny." Forward — to — destiny! Frau Merkel, like M. Hollande in Paris, has determined that what the Greeks and the Portuguese and the Spanish need is "more Europe." Onward!
What’s ironic is the fact that the EU was supposed to prevent the Germans from ever again threatening to over-run Europe. Now Europe is begging Germany to become master of the continent in an effort to save the EU.

Clemens’s No Hitter


I am not sports fan and to prove it I didn’t know that Roger Clemens was a pitcher … I though he was a home run hitter.   But the last few years have convinced me that the government has too many prosecutors with much too much time on their hands, unlimited resources, and the ability to find a law to convict you on to make a name for themselves much like a hunter putting a trophy head on their wall. 

Exhibit (A) is Scooter Libby whose life was ruined by an out-of-control egomaniac, Patrick Fitzgerald.  You remember Fitzgerald?  He was the independent prosecutor who was brought in to find out who outed Valerie Plame, learned right away it was Richard Armitage, decide that he didn’t want to prosecute Armitage but wanted to go after someone, anyone in Cheney’s office, ended up sending Scooter Libby to jail for failure to remember what he said to a member of the MSM. 

There should be some law that allows the victims of these legalized search and destroy operations personally liable for their misdeeds.
The government’s five-years-long pursuit of the great hurler was ended by a jury in just a few hours. The prosecutors, according to the Associated Press, slinked away from the courthouse without comment, and the Justice Department put out a statement claiming, “we respect the judicial process.”
The claim will be met with incredulity, given the Justice Department’s behavior in this case.
These people are scum and should be concerned about being sued and spending at least the next few years in prison. 

Enoch Powell at 100

He was so right about so many things.  It's why he was hated.

"Not Showing Up To Riot" Is A Failed Conservative Policy

What we see with the new generation is a willingness to imitate the most effective tactics of the Left. Many of us are former lefties who learned from the pros and then switched sides. The rest of use are young and don’t see the point of playing Charlie Brown and the football. What made Andrew Breitbart so terrifying to the Left isn’t that he did anything new, it’s that they’d never been on the receiving end of it before.
Via Small Dead Animals

Martin Bashir engages in a little assassination porn

Secret Service agents partied like rock stars on Obamas' Vineyard Vacation

Long before President Obama's security detail was scandalized in Colombia and new revelations emerged last week about the Secret Service, members of the elite team earned an "Animal House" reputation at the blueblood vacation mecca of Martha's Vineyard.

Local residents say wild parties, fights and late-night carousing involving Secret Service members have become commonplace in recent years at the Vineyard, a favorite getaway for the First Family and longtime destination for upper-crust members of the Northeastern political, media and business establishment.

Note in recent years .  Trashed houses, drunker orgies, lost badges, police cover-ups.  The Secret Service as Animal House in the Obama regime.

  Read the whole thing.

Things that make you examine your views.

Is This Andrea Mitchell’s “Exploding Gas Tank Moment?”


Remember a few years ago when NBC’s “Dateline” accused GM’s Chevrolet pick-up trucks of having exploding gas tanks?  Unable to get the gas tanks to explode on cue, they decided to rig the story by putting explosives in a truck’s gas tank.  GM caught on, sued the network, and got an on-air apology and the firing of some of the network’s staff. 




Fortunately for GM, they got a tip that the crash was rigged. Unfortunately for Bosnia’s Christians, there was no one to blow the whistle on the propaganda until it was too late for them and American bombs rained down.

Wherever you go amateurs with video cameras or “smart phones” are there along with the camera crews of the major networks and Andrea Mitchell can only briefly get away with the kind of lying she does here.



It’s only a matter of a few hours before the truth gets out. And even if it’s not picked up by the MSM, the audience seeing this on the Internet is larger than the MSNBC audience, reinforcing what people already know, we are being lied to by the press.



If radical Mormons had initiated acts of terrorism in Manhattan, do you think their religion would be held up for mockery each night on Broadway?

Jeffrey Goldberg answers: 

ManyMuslims believe that Muhammad ascended to heaven from Jerusalemon a winged animal, which has the ring of something mystical and transcendent. If Muhammad had departed for heaven from Tenafly,New Jersey, well, that would open up Islam to some level of derision.
Check that: It wouldn’t open up Islam to derision, because some Muslims -- in particular a set of ill-tempered fundamentalists among them -- have made it quite dangerous for anyone to mock their religion. Not so with Mormons.

Liberals and other atheists are theological bullies.  They only hit you if you don't hit back.

Andrea Mitchell Deceptive Editing Tries To Create "Supermarket Scanner" Moment. But She Gets Caught!


Here’s Andrea Mitchell straining to turn this into Mitt’s very own “supermarket scanner” moment, which (as the Corner notes) was a bogus hit on Bush 41 but served the Democratic narrative that Republicans are always and forever “out of touch.


Fortunately, someone else at the rally had a camera and got the video without the biased MSNBC editing. It's a good story.


Thanks to modern technology, the kind of lies that Andrea Mitchell tried to peddle now blows up in their faces.

Wow. What a racist group of journalists.



Remember, when you interrupt the president it's because you are a racist!

Neil Munro explains his exchange with President Obama in Rose Garden

Monday, June 18, 2012

MSM Doesn't Want to Cover Fast & Furious

'Fast and Furious' whistleblower says he's 'disappointed' one year later

How Chris Cillizza and the Washington Post are defending Obama.

It’s as predictable as the swallows returning to Capistrano. See a failed Democrat in the Oval office and the question becomes  Can any president succeed in today’s political world? It happened during the Carter administration, it happened when Clinton was caught having sex with an intern.

The press would like to string Neil Munro up from a light post. “It wouldn’t happen to a white President” is the race card being played. It’s cheap, it’s racist, it’s right out of the Liberal play book.


Maybe the job’s just too much for any one man is the fall-back position for the press when their anointed president screws up.

And when the opposition dares to raise its voice, the press attacks like hyenas. To take the latest example, the press would like to string Neil Munro up from a light post. They are labeling him a “heckler” at the Wall Street Journal!


They are calling him a racist. “It wouldn’t happen to a white President” they tell us. It’s cheap, it’s disgusting, its right out of the Liberal play book.

And poor Obama, it’s never his fault. It’s the fault of Europe, the Middle East, it’s the “banksters,” it’s congress, it’s Rush Limbaugh. What can the world be thinking? Doesn’t it know that its role in life is to make Obama look good?

He's a good fisking of the Cillizza article.  it ends
Still, this article reminds me of the debate going on among the political cognoscenti during the Carter administration. Where it was argued that the Presidency had gotten to be too big of a job for just one man. And that it should be divided between two or even three people. Oddly enough, that debate ended once Reagan was in the White House for a few weeks.And the same thing will happen to Mr. Cillizza’s concerns if we elect a real leader and who wants to move the country in the direction that the people actually want to go.

3 churches in Nigeria attacked by suicide bombers


Religion of Peace at work.

Three suicide bomb attacks on churches rocked a northern Nigerian state Sunday, killing at least 12 people and wounding about 80, officials said, prompting protests in a state that has previously been strained by religious tensions.
The first two blasts occurred within minutes of each other and targeted two churches in the city of Zaria, said Kaduna State police chief Mohammed Abubakar Jinjiri. A third blast hit a church in the city of Kaduna about half an hour later, Jinjiri said.

Not getting much attention in the MSM, an AP note was found on the bottom of page 14 of today's Virginian Pilot. The headline today? "Navy Takes Steps to Combat Poor Personal Choices." No kidding, that's the headline &; lead story. From the paper that didn't find that a mob attack on its reporters was newsworthy.

Why on earth anyone disputes President Obama's socialism is a matter of some confusion.

From Word Around the Net.

Why on earth anyone disputes President Obama's socialism is a matter of some confusion. He's made it pretty clear, even if he's been inconsistent about implementing the philosophy while president. From his membership in the hard left socialist New Party to his speeches on wealth redistribution at a Democratic Socialists town meeting in 1996, its obvious the hard left (even communist) influences of his youth have been central to his political philosophy. The strange thing is Obama's New Party membership came up in 2008 but the only thing the press wanted to talk about was VP candidate Sarah Palin's husband's involvement with an Alaskan separatist party.
It's not strange at all.  The press does not cover subjects that affect their side negatively.

How America’s governing class became like their like their tyrannical and corrupt predecessors within the imperial bureaucracy.


People are people, no matter where they are.  Give them enough power, enough money and sufficient time to pass after the Revolution, and they fall into a very familiar pattern.  There is a good book review at Belmont Club of Ending ‘Big SIS’ (The Special Interest State) and Renewing the American Republic

The Founders were under no illusions that native-born Americans would be any different from the British bureaucrats against whom they had rebelled. They too in time would become like their like their tyrannical and corrupt predecessors within the imperial bureaucracy, handing out privileges to cronies and selected groups, which they had lately fought to end.


Their key defensive idea was simple. The Constitution would be designed to pit one set of politicians against the other. “If faction could not be prevented, it had to be neutralized. Even better would be to harness faction to provide stability to the republic.” ...


The catastrophe happened, DeLong says, because the Founders forgot that factions could cooperate as well as compete through log-rolling as well as a host of other mechanisms. The interest groups had become despite their differences, what Leo Linbeck has called the Party of Incumbency and more broadly what Angelo de Codevilla termed the “court party” or the New American Ruling Class. They realized it was in their common interest to cooperate in order to put themselves collectively in charge of literally everything.

The media are now part of the Ruling Class, enabling ever greater government power.

A compliant media has convinced the public that to every problem there is an agency and a rule for every purpose under heaven. The media has learned to craft “compassion trap” stories in which heart-rending problems can be fixed by yet another government bureaucracy whose creation only the cruel could refuse to fund.
Is there a way out?  There always is because time flows on.  Whether Americans will recover their country, will go the way of empires or descend like Europe is the question.  Pray that God is not done with America yet.

"If young Americans knew what was good for them, they would all be in the Tea Party."

In his first lecture, which will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Tuesday, Prof Ferguson will insist the current public debt “allows the current generation of voters to live at the expense of those as yet too young to vote or as yet unborn.”
“It is surprisingly easy to win the support of young voters for policies that would ultimately make matters even worse for them, like maintaining defined benefit pensions for public employees,” ...
If you attend a Tea Party rally, you will find lots of young people as wells as the middle aged and some elderly.  The Tea Party is Middle America with an attitude. 

How rich is filthy rich comedian Jon Stewart?

The 49-year-old Stewart, born Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz, makes more than 300 times the median American salary, owns three luxury homes and sometimes doesn’t pay his taxes.


Stewart’s own income level brings him and his wife Tracey approximately $41,000 a day. The celebrity income-handicapping website Celebrity Net Worth lists his annual salary as $15 million and estimates his net worth at $80 million.


In 2009 and 2010, 'Daily Show' host Jon Stewart bought these two lakefront mansions in Red Bank, New Jersey for $3,800,000 and $3,200,000.


Golf, the Economy and Obama

Via DRUDGE

Obama plays 100th round of golf...

Flashback: Axelrod called Bush 'out of touch' for playing golf in bad economy...


Why won't you get this in the MSM?  Let Sarah Palin explain.


Sunday, June 17, 2012

Rules are for little people. Judges are not mere mortals.


It seems that the Egyptian Supreme Court had determined that the last election was unconstitutional.  Who knew that Egypt had a constitution?  But then I guess that even dictatorships have laws.  It’s just that dictators don’t have to follow them. 
Which brings me to the Commonwealth of Virginia, where judges are appointed by the General Assembly … except when they are appointed by other judges.
It seems that one Tracy Thorne-Begland failed to win enough votes in the General Assembly to receive an appointment to be a general district court judge.  He needed 51 votes, received 33, not even close.  Thorne-Begland is homosexual, a virtual copy of the Mitchell Pritchett character in Modern Family, raising twins with his partner.  During the debate, his opponents said that he lied and failed to follow orders when he joined the Navy and later came out very publicly – appearing on  ABC’s “Nightline” - as homosexual at a time when open homosexuals were not allowed in the military.  Supporters cried bigotry and homophobia.
Enter Richard D. Taylor, chief judge of the Circuit Court who appointed Thorne-Begland to the General District Court of Richmond.  The appointment requires confirmation by the Virginia General Assembly which meets for about 13 weeks at the beginning of each year. 
Was there a judicial emergency in Richmond that required the appointment of another judge?  We know of none.  Were there other candidates for the position?  Yes, there were.  Was political pressure brought to bear on the court?  Yes.  The MSM in Virginia were behind gay judges, having found that there wre none, deciding that bigotry was the only reason for General Assembly opposition.  Then there was the letter to circuit judges from leaders of the five largest Richmond law firms.   Gotta have a gay judge in view of the number of gay lawyers. 
The Republican leaders of the General Assembly are not pleased. 

"Today, the Richmond City Circuit Court exercised their statutory right to fill a vacancy in Richmond's General District Court. We are surprised and disappointed that these judges did not afford the actions of the General Assembly due deference in coming to their decision. Our disappointment has nothing to do with the particular candidate in question, but rather reflects our feeling that in this case, the Richmond Circuit Court is not simply filling a judicial vacancy, but is substituting their judgment for that of the General Assembly and superseding the General Assembly's vested Constitutional authority to choose judges. 

The Circuit Courts may fill a vacancy with the candidate of their choice to ensure that the court will function properly until the General Assembly meets again and can elect a judge for a full term. The authority given to the Circuit Courts was not intended to function as an appeals process for candidates who have been previously rejected by the General Assembly. To place Mr. Thorne-Begland on the bench notwithstanding that rejection is to reach beyond the intended bounds of the Circuit Court's authority to make such recess appointments.”
When will legislators learn?  Following the rules is for little people.

Saturday, June 16, 2012

Rush floored at CNN reporter not even trying to disguise bias over Obama bypassing Congress today

Via the Right Scoop.


Press circles the wagons for Obama ... so what else is new?



From Glenn Reynolds:
NEIL MUNRO CALLED A “DISRESPECTFUL ASSHOLE” BY . . . Alex Pareene? When Alex Pareene is standing up for old-fashioned decorum, the winds of change are blowing hard.
UPDATE: Now this is respectful! MSNBC splices exploding buses into Romney bus tour footage.
ANOTHER UPDATE: From the comments: “It’s NBC. They’re used to faking explosions.”
Even FOX NEWS Ed Henry leaps to defend Obama
Ed Henry‏@edhenryTV @Ivanalaska AGREED -- we SHOULD ask tough questions, every day. But no need to interrupt a President's statement
Since Neil Munro generated more information from Obama that the rest of the White House Press Corpse maybe we should send the rest home.

Obama's Pity Party

Via Glenn Reynolds: 
Our incumbent president is holding a giant pity party, while failing to address the nation’s challenges in a responsible manner. Like Lebowski’s Walter Sobchak, Barack Obama is a man living in the past. And there is no Dude or Donny to save him.”

It's Still Bush's Fault

Well...it worked in '08

See, there's this car, and Bush was driving it, I guess to his ranch in Texas or something. Well, maybe it was a pickup truck, like with the big steer horns on the front, and a gun rack in the back of the cab. So Bush was driving this very Texas-looking truck and for some reason he drove it into a ditch. And instead of doing the sensible thing and calling, like, a tow truck to get it out, he gave the keys to Obama to try and get the truck out of the ditch.

So, Obama took the keys and then tossed them into the ditch with the truck in it, and stood on the side of the road for over three years with a cardboard sign that said "Look what Bush did to his truck.
Read the whole thing.